Whether you are working to generate the new BIG idea for your industry or working to solve internal organizational challenges, the 3D Solution Design Process™ from ALCEMIS helps you and your teams generate and implement meaningful innovative solutions for sustainable growth.
Build a Creative Habit
The brain is a pattern-seeking, meaning-making tool. It likes to move us toward habitual patterns of thought, helping us to process large amounts of information quickly. However, these habitual thought patterns also become roadblocks to creative thinking and action when they prevent us from moving in new directions.
With conscious effort, you can break the habitual patterns that prevent you from seeing, thinking and acting differently in order to create value. With conscious effort, you can build a creative habit, allowing you to continually see new patterns, make new connections and make better decisions – leading your organization to greater results.
Making better decisions about what is or could be valuable requires you to break habitual patterns of thought to see more possibilities and new patterns. Creative solution design goes beyond brainstorming and developing a lot of ideas. So, let’s say you have a lot of ideas. They really only make a difference when you implement those that add value.
The Process
The ALCEMIS 3D Solution Design Process is rooted in creative problem solving methodology. It integrates design for mutual benefit along with iterations of divergence and convergence to help you generate and implement the best solutions for your business and organizational challenges.
Phase 1: DISCOVER
The 3D Solution Design Process provides your teams with a process they can use to explore challenges and opportunities before they start generating ideas. Too often teams jump straight from an initial challenge statement to idea generation, generating only a few ideas and selecting the one that seems cheapest and/or fastest. When cheapest and fastest are not key evaluation criteria for the stakeholders, you’ve missed the mark on delivering a meaningful innovative solution.
When teams jump straight to generating ideas, they often miss out on valuable information and insights into the real challenge or opportunity – information and insights found during exploration and clarification in the Discover phase.
Einstein has said that a “well-defined problem is a problem half-solved,” so it is crucial to spend time in DISCOVER.
Phase 2: DESIGN
Many organizations have provided brainstorming training for their teams. The 3D Solution Design Process goes beyond brainstorming. It integrates Constructive Debate and Consensus into the Design phase. This tool engages team members in constructive dialogue and debate about ideas so that the ideas can be refined and improved to create better solutions.
Marco Marson, author of Think Naked, states “New to the world ideas rarely come fully formed in a single bolt from the blue. They happen with round after round of refining and recombining ideas.”
Learning how to debate about and refine ideas in a collaborative way is important in generating meaningful innovative solutions.
Evaluation of ideas against criteria that align with the needs of stakeholders identified in the Discover phase is also a key component of the 3D Solution Design Process. This emphasizes the relevance of spending time in Discover to identify what needs stakeholders have, what assumptions are being made and what is really important. When using relevant design criteria, teams can make better decisions about the ideas they have vetted and tested in the DESIGN phase.
Phase 3: DO
Once a solution idea or ideas have been selected, teams must plan for and implement the solutions as they move into the DO phase. Here we rely on business planning, project management and change management tools.